| Zusammenfassung: | This article examines postwar repatriations of Polish citizens from the Lviv1 region, a territory in southeastern Poland (presently in western Ukraine) incorporated into the Soviet Union during World War II. The war that historians neatly consign to the familiar time brackets of 1939–1945 did not end with Germany's collapse. The unspeakable confrontation that decimated and uprooted millions of Europeans continued under the guise of postwar forced migrations, repatriations, and population transfers. Indeed, relocation and displacement provided fundamental building blocks in the Polish communist effort of reconstructing Poland. Building a Polish nation-state impelled the new regime to identify and claim Polish inhabitants of the so-called kresy, Poland's former eastern provinces ceded to the Soviet Union. Migrations of Poles to the territories that Poland acquired from the defeated Nazi state, comprised critical moments in the emergence of new Polish communities in former German lands. These repatriates considered relocation as an opportunity to escape a cherished homeland now under the domination of a foreign and detested power. This article, thus, explores the wider cultural context in which Polish women and children assigned meaning to their traumatic experiences. The meanings that these eastern Poles (kresowianie) attached to the conditions at embarkation points and on dirt and pathogen-infested transports are crucial to understanding how the experience of repatriation reshaped postwar Polish identities. Indeed, this study addresses pivotal questions for the understanding of post-1945 Eastern Europe: what was the role of mass population movements in the reconstruction of war-torn societies? How did displaced people start new lives in adverse and unpredictable circumstances? Most importantly, how did the new communist authorities and migrants from the kresy renegotiate the meaning of resettlement and the postwar national community in general?
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